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So, in all that's going on, I totally spaced on the fact that our manuscript is currently under review by our cultural consulting team. We're expecting to get that back this week, at which point further layout work begins in earnest. This is this is shaping up to be somewhere in the realm of a 250-300 page project, which is on the large size for books we usually produce. A basic first draft of layout will probably take two weeks. One to develop a chapter sample, and the second to roll out that baseline of design to the rest of the text. And there's plenty of fiddling after that. Where something like a novel written in straight prose may have just a few styles that are fairly easy to develop, a game book has easily a dozen or more to handle all the different kinds of information architecture. Assuming that this timeline holds reasonably to intended form, we are intending to show you a complete first-draft manuscript for the next update near the end of November.
After that, there's a lot of fiddling to fix up whatever other problems we find: Proofreading. Copyfitting. Layout and tweaking of the supplemental materials. We're getting there...
Hey folks,
Very short update today, as we take care of a lot of things that have (inconveniently) triaged themselves up to the top of the to-do list: in case you're interested...
We're still working on cleaning up the manuscript and making sure that we're not editing enormous swaths of copy throughout the layout process and while reviewing the outline Mendez caught a number of old mechanics in one of the earlier documents that hadn't been looked at in a while. So that's being fixed. We've also been trying (unsuccessfully) to get in touch with the intended printer and the word on the street is that they're deep in a backlog right now (unsurprisingly) and so we haven't been able to start wrapping up that end of the book production anyway.
Anyway, I'm personally a little disappointed that this portion of things didn't come with more interesting stuff to look at or get hype about. Sometimes, thems the breaks. Any questions? We're happy to answer!
-Tim
Happy September, everyone. I am extremely pleased to announce that we’re finished with the manuscript as a whole!
And now entering into the long, detailed, homestretch that is all of the rest of producing a book. I joke…a little. But there is a lot to do now. All of the writing is in roughly a dozen different documents and the first thing I’ve done is write a detailed outline in order to start planning how to organize the book in layout. Sure, we had a variety of general ideas, but now that we have a manuscript done we get to start doing the actual architecture of organizing the book into formatted pages for learning, reference, and play.
I’m also working with our printer to verify that we can make exactly the book we want for the price we planned. The only risk factor of substance we foresee on that end is that our MSRP ends up higher than we’d targeted, but that just means you got a deal!
We’ve snapshotted some of the layout ideas we’ve been working on previously. This informs what we’re doing in terms of pagination, i.e. how we’re organizing all of the art that’s going into the book, how we want the chapters to flow and which side of the page the different sections need to start and end on. This is ultimately most relevant for the print book (pagination is specifically most relevant to facing-page spreads and doesn’t substantially affect single page view PDFs).
At this point, we've shown off previews of most everything that's in the book and my mental well of ideas on what to share with y'all is running a little low. So tell me, what are your burning questions? Consider this a bit of an AMaA on producing a book, Thousand Arrows, Galileo Games, or anything in between!
-Tim
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